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Snake-Handlers, False Messiahs, and a Few Great Souls: 14 Who Died in 2014

…o join ISIS in June 2014. He was killed by Syrian rebels two months later, carrying $800 and an American passport. Charles Robert Moore Methodist minister Charles Robert Moore self-immolated in his hometown of Grand Saline, Texas, calling the city and the country to repent. In a note left on his car, Moore wrote that “American, and Grand Saline …have never really repented for the atrocities of slavery and its aftermath.”He had previously worked to…

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The Sacred and the Dead: The Trouble with Sugar Magnolia

…r “Ripple” conversation, and today, there are hundreds of Dead songs on my phone and dozens of live recordings in playlists, even a nod when I see a Deadhead sticker on a car. I am a relapsed Catholic, and thanks to my friend, I am also a repentant Deadhead. Dear Jesus, let me confess: I even wear Birkenstocks. Shannon. Deadshow, Deadhead. Dominquez Hills, 1990. Photo by ChasM3/https://www.flickr.com/photos/chasm3/ “Sugar Magnolia,” however, still…

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Milquetoast Liberal Religion Won’t Challenge Conservative Values: A History Lesson

…arge part of the Great Plains, restored wildlife and built a system of over 800 state and county parks. They electrified an entire region of the country, bringing what had been America’s “Third World” up to 20th century standards. They created works of art, gave concerts, set up theaters throughout the country, ran nursery schools, served over 1.2 billion school lunches to needy children, gave immunizations, taught illiterate adults to read and wr…

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Wichita, the Sequel: A Clinic Reopens at Ground Zero in America’s Fight over Abortion

…wman’s own colleague, Cheryl Sullenger, the Operation Rescue staffer whose number Roeder was carrying after the murder, and who was herself convicted in 1988 of conspiring to bomb a San Diego abortion clinic, Newman expressed bafflement that people might link anti-abortion activism with violence. He’s not the only one. “There is nothing on that flyer that is even remotely violent-prone,” Spirit One Christian Ministry’s leader, Mark Holick, a 52-ye…

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Death in the Desert: Riding With the Samaritans

…grants from their homes. They are pulled to the U.S. because of demand for cheap labor. One of the major pushes came in the ’90s with the passage of NAFTA, which opened the door to many agri-businesses to move farms down to Mexico, putting small farmers out of business. And while the number of undocumented border crossers is down, Brother David says, it will be virtually impossible to eliminate them as long as the opportunities for jobs exist. As…

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Does War Make Sense? Science and Religion on the Battlefield

…ith formal, centralized leadership. With access to drug money, oil wealth, cheap weapons, and consumer-grade digital toys, they don’t have to worry that 93% of people in the Muslim world still refuse to condone the 9/11 attacks. No one can control them: not their communities, their politicians, their leading clerics, nor even their ostensible figurehead, bin Laden himself. When forced out of one area, the fighters re-create another in their own im…

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An American Muslim Abroad, Or, Things I Saw in Dubai

…h buildings, starting right around the same time. Talk about luxury on the cheap; it’s hard to deny a feeling of similarity. (The tower is to the Burj as a certain toupee is to hair: might the Trump Tower inadvertently mimic an Islamic motif?)   The regal twin palm trees in the foreground are the world’s tallest, at some 3,500 feet each. Recently a falling coconut crushed an entire apartment complex, punching a massive hole that has filled up with…

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‘Cult’ Is an Inaccurate, Unhelpful and Dangerous Label for Followers of Trump, QAnon, and 1/6

…ntly seen in the Trumpist version of the Republican Party. Some people may carry out revolution, or, if lacking a critical mass of participants, take terrorist actions in their attempts to create their desired collective salvation. On January 6, 2021, it probably seemed to a number of participants and supporters in the Euro-American Nativist Millennial Movement that they had finally achieved the critical mass of adherents to overthrow Congress. Th…

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“As Orthodox As They Come”: A Backstage Conversation With Rob Bell

…re so fantastic—brought the idea that the whole thing is static. I think a number of people picked up over the past three hundred years that space is empty, we move things around in space, and there are levers and pulleys and buttons. I think for a number of people, atheism is simply the rejection of somebody sitting on a cloud somewhere with a beard who might intervene from time to time. I think quantum physics, the little I know, it just intuiti…

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Lying About Our Religion, And Other Problems With Polling

…But what CNN really meant was “When asked by a complete stranger, over the phone, to define their spiritual lives in a single phrase, one-third of those adults who responded to this poll (response rate: one in ten), and who fall within an arbitrarily-defined generational frame, declined to tell the aforementioned complete stranger that they were affiliated with any specific religious group.” These are not equivalent statements. For some reason, th…

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